https://www.everardlondon.com/artist/TERESA%20KUTALA_FIRMINO/works/3640
The fearless artist, Teresa Kutala Firmino, paints a world encompassing worlds of magic, of human-melded-animals, of strong women in a world of predatory men, of a bleak sandy landscape. Perhaps it is Pomfret, on the edge of the Kalahari desert, where she was born and where miniature lampposts provide only tiny speckles of light. If you strain your eyes you may glimpse a miniscule open door to freedom in the distance. And an even tinier closed one. There is no return.
There are eyes and more eyes, doubling up as breasts. These eyes and nurturing bodies see and know and live in this world comprising many worlds simultaneously. The woman’s couch in the foreground is also a dog. The other two women float on air in a dimension between sky and the belittled earth.
Firmino is named for her Congolese paternal grandmother, who fled to the forest from civil war and a violent husband. She bequeathed her talented granddaughter worlds of magical stories, with which she could paint her lives.
Perhaps the woman on the couch tore open the Zebra-striped cloth to release the angel, which she may be summoning with her long blue flipper leg. Perhaps. The genie thus liberated could be granting wishes to a gifted artist in the sad, forgotten world of Pomfret, enabling her to fly.
How could this abundance have emerged from an artist, who was born and raised in a place like Pomfret? How could it not? Pomfret. Site of a toxic asbestos-mine camp turned home to the infamous 32 Battalion, which included Portuguese-speaking Angolan veterans who had served with the South African Defense Force during the Border War.
These Angolans are Firmino’s forebears, on her mother’s side. Now Pomfret is an abandoned place without services, employment or hope.
“A former community hall near the center of Pomfret lies in ruins, pulled down by police officers during attempts to relocate residents and shut down the town in 2008. The town’s clinic, post office, and police station, among other public buildings, are similarly derelict.” The Wrong Side of History, by Christopher Clark, Harper’s Magazine.
The painting is layered, determined by the forces of bloody wars, abuse of women and the unpredictable. Not a mere proliferation of worlds, but an interpenetration. Harsh realities are interwoven into stories, colour, paint and the power of the imaginary.
I love that angel – part Tinkerbell fairy, part Arabian Night, part ancestor, part spirit. One can only imagine – and that is the point.
It is indeed a fairy story how Firmino left Pomfret for Johannesburg where she studied fine art at the University of the Witwatersrand.
The harlequin back- to- front male is giving the frog-woman the evil eye. Her arm is ripped open to the bare flesh, burnt by that eye and that wild leopard soldier-man, tearing his country, his family, apart with his betrayals. Her eyes may be dimmed, but she has survived.
Worlds within the world. Forgotten Pomfret comes to life.